Reddit reviews Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City

The section in your main link (Sharkey et al.) on individual poverty covers most of the primary ideas behind general crime motivations / lack of inhibition. It does not cover violence specifically as much. To supplement that, I would recommend Elijah Anderson's The Code of the Street as an entry point to the extensive literature on the role of violence and the threat of violence in communities of concentrated disadvantage (i.e. "the ghetto"). To that, add the deep literature on aversion to contacting the police in poor communities of color---and the resulting reliance on violence and other informal methods for solving disputes---and you have a pretty clear recipe for high violence.

Really interesting that in the 70s just as that Neoliberal ideology was hyping up, there were cultural criminologists writing exactly about that--the cultural norms of individuals & entrepreneurship, in the context of poverty and boundaries to access, will necessarily lead to violent actions. It's a very well supported thesis on the cultural/reflective side, though the statistical empirics are much harder to gauge.

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That said there are some who still pursue this project:

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https://global.oup.com/academic/product/in-their-own-words-9780190298272?cc=us&lang=en&

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https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/in-search-of-respect/249DEBEBF9C6D02A0CE1D9BB8A790DF4

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https://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Criminology-Jeff-Ferrell/dp/1446259161

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https://www.amazon.com/Code-Street-Decency-Violence-Moral/dp/0393320782/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=11MJQDNHZFCV6QZZARVC

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http://faculty.washington.edu/matsueda/courses/517/Readings/Goffman%20ASR%202009.pdf

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It strikes me as very odd that they thought they could get a representative study of gun violence from the same place Anderson did this study

I just have gotten the sense from some reading and (candidly) some stand up comics, that there is an unhealthy amount of misogyny in the inner-city (read: African American) community. I have done some very cursory reading on the subject but am certainly not a sociologist. My citation is from wikipedia so it's not like I'm doing a lot of academic lifting.

Some Amazon-ing found to quote on page 154 though I'm not sure why the citation above is a range. The book is here and searching "exploit the young woman" found it for me. I also posted a picture of the page here.

>Seems to me, that there are a lot of words for "woman" with very negative connotations (I won't list them here), whereas the word "female" has a very specific scientific meaning and very little connotation, so it seems like a fairly innocuous word to use, given the alternatives.

The problem I have with "female" is that it has a scientific meaning that basically says "the only thing about this being we care about is its sex." When talking about a person that's so reductionist. And you're right, there are alternatives that don't deserve enumeration but there are certainly good or truly neutral ones and I don't think "female" makes that list.

>Calling the OP out on using the incorrect term seems like jumping on the bandwagon of throwing him under the bus. I think OP's intent was not vicious, nor demeaning, he is just not good at talking to or about women.

That's totally fair but I think there's two sides to that. Either OP is accidentally being demeaning and calling him out on it will help him learn what is ok when talking to/about women. Without saying something about it, OP will go on being bad talking about/to women. The alternative is that he knows it's not ok but is in a dark place and doing it out of anger/spite/misogyny. Not saying something may implicitly reinforce that the behavior is acceptable.

You're right, throwing him under the bus for it isn't helpful. He's not a horrible person because he is calling women "females" though it may turn him into a Ferengi. That said, saying "this behavior is not a thing that should happen" seems good if it's done in a respectful kind of way. Candidly, I'm not sure "[o]verwhelmingly, douches say 'females' instead of 'women'" does this in a productive way.

Code of the Street is an interesting examination of life, violence and poverty in inner-city Philadelphia. I read it a couple of months ago and thought it was great.

Great American City by Richard Sampson

Examines neighborhood effects in Chicago, focussing on the most segregated neighborhoods. Develops Sampson's hypotheses of the effects of collective efficacy. Generally influenced by Chicago school of urban studies.

More historically interesting, start of a more or less contested branch of theory, Social disorganization theory.
Shaw, Clifford R. and McKay, Henry D. Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969

If you want more of an individual-centered "light" read (and haven't read it already),
Code of the street by Elijah Anderson

Please do! I learned a lot by reading Code of the Street It does a really excellent job of explaining these communities as foreign cultures, not just crime networks.

It's a new culture, and one that's not easy to understand from the outside. But there are admirable morals at play.

I also learned the hard way that the kids are not going to fall over themselves to educate me on their culture. They've fallen for that before. They are judged and lectured. I only made any progress when I demonstrated some real understanding on my own, and then they would happily correct me on details and idioms.

If you want to share something with your kids, I highly suggest showing them this video. It was really popular with the kids I taught. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVD-HsHoUNM